A Light to Yourself by J. Krishnamurti

Author:J. Krishnamurti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Krishnamurti Foundation Trust, Ltd.

After all, what is the mind? Please, sirs, do not merely listen to my words, to my explanations or descriptions, but watch your own mind in operation. I am not giving positive directions because, as I explained, any positive thinking is really thoughtlessness. Whereas, if you think negatively, which is to observe your own mind without directing, without telling it what to do—because the director, the entity who says, “This is right, that is wrong,” is still part of the mind—if you can merely watch your mind as you would observe a flower, without demanding anything, without translating what you see, then you will discover that this very observation brings clarification because the mind is not then seeking a result, it is not concerned with reward or punishment; it just wants to observe, to know what is true. And you cannot know what is true if there is a director who is already shaped by the past, by a particular conditioning. So please listen to find out for yourself, and you can find out for yourself only when you watch your own mind, that is, when the mind watches itself.

Now, what is the mind? It is not only a series of responses to the various challenges which are always impinging upon us but also a series of memories, conscious or unconscious, which are constantly shaping the present according to the conditioning of the past to conform to a future pattern. Watch yourselves, sirs; don’t merely listen to my words and repeat them. Watch yourself and you will see that your mind is a series of desires, and the urge to fulfill those desires, in which are involved fear and frustration—I want something, I can’t get it, so I am frustrated, unhappy. You love me, I don’t love you; therefore, you feel frustrated, and so on and on.

The mind is also a series of ideas related to the past and to our desires; that is, the mind thinks in terms of progress. I am this, I want to be that, and I need time to arrive. Being envious, I say I must have time to arrive at the state of nonenvy, which is what we call progress, evolution. But is it? Please watch your own mind in operation. Can thought progress towards truth, reality, God, or can it only move from the known to the known? And is thinking independent of memory, or is it merely the repetition of the background, which is memory?

All this is the content of the mind, the mind being both the conscious and the unconscious. In the unconscious are stored up the racial memories as well as the individual experiences which I have not understood, and all these memories, the collective and the individual, impinge on the mind in that process which we call thinking, do they not? Desire, fear, frustration, wanting to act, wanting to improve, trying to fulfill oneself through some ambition, thinking that there is an atma, a supersoul, or that there is none—all that is the mind.

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